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Hyannis Port

Seven Fun Facts About Joseph Kennedy, Father of a Dynasty

One summer day in the early 1960s, Joseph Kennedy was sitting in his wheelchair in front of his Hyannis Port home,as a marine helicopter lifted up from the lawn. He had suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak.

Inside the helicopter were his son, President John F. Kennedy, and his son’s friend, Chuck Spalding. Kennedy looked down, pointed at his father and said, “He made the whole thing possible.”

Joseph Kennedy, center, at Jack’s birthday party in Hyannis Port, 1963.

Joseph Kennedy did indeed make his son’s presidency possible. He had made a fortune and served in high office himself, all while founding the Kennedy political dynasty. From 1946, when Jack began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, to 2011, a child or grandchild of his served in public office.

The gods gave Joseph Kennedy much — money, fame, power. They also took much away. He outlived four of his nine children, and a fifth Rosemary, suffered a botched lobotomy that forced her institutionalization.

Joseph, Jr., died in action during World War II. Kathleen died in a plane crash. John, known as Jack, was assassinated in his third year as president, and Robert was killed on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination for president. Pat married move star Peter Lawford and Eunice founded the Special Olympics, Jean served as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, and Ted was one of the longest tenured and most effective members of the U.S. Senate.

Joe himself suffered a stroke in 1961 and died on Nov. 18, 1969.

Many stories have been told about the larger-than-life Joseph Kennedy, some true, some partly true, some complete nonsense. Here are seven true ones.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

1. Joseph Kennedy, Pampered Son

Born Sept. 6, 1888, he grew up in comfort, but didn’t let anyone know. His grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, had immigrated from Ireland, worked in the East Boston shipyards and died at 35, like many Irish immigrant men. But his father, P.J., bought a saloon for a song and prospered with it. He opened more saloons, got lucrative, no-show patronage jobs and won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. P.J. also won a seat in the state Senate but left after one term because he preferred being a ward boss.

Joseph Kennedy’s senior high school picture

Young Joe grew up on an elegant tree-lined street in a large waterfront house. His mother, who came from a lace-curtain Irish family in Brockton, spoiled him. “Joe did not come in on a raft,” said his niece. “His life was very comfortable.”

But he loved Horatio Alger books, and wanted people to think he alone was responsible for his success.

2. No Scholar

He got lousy grades in high school, Boston Latin, and had to repeat his senior year. But he excelled at sports, which mattered more to him. He was captain of the tennis team, played basketball and excelled at baseball. He batted an astonishing.667 as a senior, winning the Mayor’s Cup in the high school league. Mayor John Fitzgerald, presided over the ceremonies in which he accepted his trophy.

He didn’t do well academically at Harvard, either, and didn’t quite dominate in sports the way he had in high school. But he managed to marry the mayor’s daughter, Rose Fitzgerald.

3. Joseph Kennedy, Draft Dodger

He dodged the draft in World War I. Though married with two children (Joe, Jr., and Jack) he didn’t qualify for a deferment based on marital status. Instead, he got a job as assistant manager of the Fore River Shipyard, and qualified for an Industrial deferment.

Kennedy had served as president of Columbia Trust Co., a small East Boston bank. He boasted of being the country’s youngest bank president, though he had a step up — his father had helped found the bank.

At Fore River, he wrote a long letter to the draft board describing his responsibilities. It worked. He didn’t get a deferment, but he didn’t get drafted, either.

Joseph P. Kennedy, President of the Columbia Trust Company around January 1914. Photograph in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

One of his tasks at Fore River was to manage the influenza pandemic at Fore River. Two thousand cases broke out among the shipyard workers. He turned dormitories into infirmaries to isolate the sick, and stayed away from home to protest his family from the flu.

4. Joseph Kennedy, Serial Philanderer

Even as a relative newlywed he didn’t always come home at night. He worked long hours, often through the weekends, and slept in his office. Or with someone else – secretaries, waitresses and actresses, including Gloria Swanson.

Rose left him

when she was pregnant with Kathleen, their fourth child. She moved home to her father and mother in Dorchester. Her father told her she couldn’t get a divorce, so she turned to medication to deal with her husband’s infidelity.

Joseph Kennedy also took separate vacations from Rose beginning when Jack, their second son, was five years old. He wanted to relax and play golf in Palm Beach. She wanted to go to Europe and buy clothes.

5. Nurturing Dad

He, not Rose, cared for Jack during his many illnesses. In 1919, two-year-old Jack came down with scarlet fever, which often killed children. Rose had just given birth and was bedridden for three weeks. Joe got him into Boston City Hospital and spent every night and afternoon at his bedside.

“During the darkest days I felt that nothing else mattered except his recovery,” wrote Joe to Jack’s doctor. He vowed he would give half his money to the Catholic Church if Jack lived. When he did, Joe wrote a check for $3,740 to the Guild of Saint Apollonia, which gave dental care to Boston children.

John F. Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy, 1919. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

6. But Not a Bootlegger

Despite the rumors, biographers haven’t found much solid evidence that he made his fortune through bootlegging. Unethical stock deals, yes. Kennedy bought stock on inside information, then legal but frowned upon. He also engaged in stock pools, where a small group of investors would target an inactive stock and trade it back and forth among themselves to create an illusion that the stock was a good, rising investment.

He made his real money in Hollywood, reorganizing and refinancing several studios that became RKO.

Not until the end of Prohibition did he invest in the distribution rights to Scotch whiskey. He diversified his investments, buying (among other things) the Chicago Merchandise Mart, then the world’s biggest office building.

7. Bow-legged Joe

President Franklin Roosevelt found him annoying. In 1935, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau suggested Kennedy for the post of Allotment Board chairman, where he would oversee the government’s purchases of gold to stabilize the market. Roosevelt said no. “The trouble with Kennedy is you always have to hold his hand,” Roosevelt said. He regularly “calls up and says he is hurt because I have not seen him.”

Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Great Britain.

Roosevelt did appoint Joseph Kennedy as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. But before nominating him, Roosevelt called him into his office and asked him to drop his pants. Kennedy complied, and Roosevelt burst into laughter. Roosevelt said, “Someone who saw you in a bathing suit once told me something I now know to be true. Joe, just look at your legs. You are just about the most bow-legged man I have ever seen.”

It mattered, explained Roosevelt, because he’d have to wear knee breeches and silk stockings during his induction ceremony as ambassador. He’d be a laughingstock. Joe, however, won permission from the British to wear tails and striped pants.

Joseph Kennedy became ambassador to the United Kingdom.

With thanks to JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 Fredrik Logevall and THE PATRIARCH: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw. Morgenthau anecdote from Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded by Ronald Kessler.

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Six Presidential Houses in New England

Before presidential libraries, there were presidential houses, and every New England state has at least one.

Massachusetts, of course, was the birthplace of the most presidents: the two Adamses, John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush. You could almost count Calvin Coolidge, as he lived in Northampton for years, and even George Washington spent nearly a year in Cambridge as commander in chief of the colonial military.

Coolidge, though, was born in Vermont, and New Hampshire gave us Franklin Pierce. No president came from Rhode Island, though Dwight Eisenhower spent considerable time in Newport. And if it weren’t for the Bushes, Connecticut and Maine would have little claim to presidential roots.

So in celebration of President’s Day, we bring you six presidential houses. If you know of another, please mention it in the comments section.

37 Hillhouse Ave.

37 Hillhouse Ave., where President George W. Bush lived for two years.

The housing shortage after World War II forced Yale University to convert an Italianate mansion into housing for married student veterans. George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara lived there while he studied at Yale and they started their family. George W. Bush lived there until he was two, and then the family moved to Texas.

The elder president had left Yale as a sophomore to serve in the Navy. Of his living conditions, he wrote, “Not to make too much of the postwar housing shortage, but there were a dozen other veterans’ families sharing the house with us — each with one child, except for Bill and Sally Reeder, who had twins. That made 40 in all.”

It couldn’t have been that much of a hardship. Both Mark Twain and Charles Dickens described Hillhouse Avenue as ‘the most beautiful street in America.’

Today, Yale uses the building for its Economics Department.

Walker Point

The main house of the Bush compound at Walker Point.

Americans grew familiar with the Bush compound during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who held news conferences while staying there. His son, George W. Bush, also stayed at the home during his presidency. So did a half dozen world leaders — and George H.W. Bush’s political opponent, former president Bill Clinton.

The Bush family has used the Walker Point estate since the days of George H.W. Bush’s great-grandparents.

Walker Point juts out into the Atlantic Ocean in Kennebunkport, Maine, and includes a large Shingle Style house, eight other residences, tennis courts, a dock and a sports field. Though the Bushes still own it, tourists enjoy the scenic drive along Ocean Avenue, where they can glimpse the property.

Peacefield

One of many presidential houses in Massachusetts, both Adams lived at Peacefield in Quincy.

Massachusetts has produced more presidents than any other New England state and can claim the most presidential houses: John and John Quincy Adams, who lived at Peacedale in Quincy. John F. Kennedy, of course, was born in Brookline, summered in Hyannis Port and lived in Boston. George H.W. Bush was born in Milton, but his family soon moved to Greenwich, Conn.

Massachusetts also has quite a presidential houses known as summer White Houses. Calvin Coolidge, who lived the greater part of his life in Northampton, spent a summer in Swampscott. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama summered on Martha’s Vineyard. Less well-known summer visitors include Franklin Pierce, who spent time in Andover, Mass., and Grover Cleveland, who vacationed in Marion and Bourne on the South Shore. Cleveland’s summer home in Bourne, Gray Gables, was torn down but rebuilt to resemble the original.

William Howard Taft summered twice in Beverly until his hostess floated her house to Marblehead to discourage him. (She didn’t like the crowds he attracted.)

We won’t even count the presidents who lived in Massachusetts while attending Harvard. Okay, we will: the Adamses, Kennedy, Obama, both Roosevelts and Rutherford B. Hayes.

But since two presidents lived most of their lives in Quincy, we chose Peacefield, the Adams Family homestead. Built by a Loyalist in 1731 and abandoned during the American Revolution, John and Abigail bought the house in 1787. They lived in London at the time, and found the house disappointing when they returned. Abigail said it looked like ‘a wren’s nest.’ But she spent years renovating and expanding it while John attended to his political duties.

John Quincy Adams also lived at Peacefield, as did his son, the statesman Charles Francis Adams and his grandson, historian Henry Adams.

Peacefield today belongs to the U.S. government as the Adams National Historical Park. It comprises 11 buildings, including the birthplaces of John and John Quincy Adams.

For more information, click here.

Franklin Pierce Homestead

The Pierce Homestead, one of two presidential houses in New Hampshire where Franklin Pierce lived.

Franklin Pierce grew up in the gracious home his father built after serving in the American Revolution. He may even have been born there in 1804, the year his father built the house.

Benjamin Pierce had bought 200 acres in Hillsborough, N.H., after the new state turnpike opened nearby. Benjamin Pierce ran a tavern, and on Christmas Eve in 1824 hosted a dinner for 21 Revolutionary War veterans. Franklin probably attended — or helped serve — the dinner. Benjamin Pierce later served two terms as New Hampshire’s governor.

Franklin lived in the family home until for 23 years until 1834, when he married. He had spent seven years away at school, college and law study in Portsmouth.

His wife, Jane Appleton, didn’t like Hillsborough, and they moved to Concord. Benjamin Pierce died in 1839 and left the house to his son-in-law. Franklin’s sister, Elizabeth, married John McNeil, Jr., a general in the War of 1812.

After his disappointing single term as president, Franklin Pierce briefly returned to his childhood home in Hillsborough.

New Hampshire actually has two Franklin Pierce presidential houses: the one in Hillsborough, and the Pierce Manse in Concord, also a house museum. For more information, click here.

Eisenhower House

Eisenhower House, one of Rhode Island’s presidential houses.

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife Mamie summered in Newport, R.I., during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 he stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. He moved to a mansion at Fort Adams.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

Another of Rhode Island’s presidential houses, Hammersmith Farm, was the site of John F. Kennedy’s marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. As president, Kennedy occasionally visited the farm, still in private hands.

Eisenhower House is now part of Fort Adams State Park and available for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Birthplace of Calvin Coolidge, one of several presidential houses in Plymouth Notch.

Calvin Coolidge’s birthplace is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.” Coolidge cannily used it as a backdrop to hone his image as a thrifty Yankee.

Coolidge was actually sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Coolidge often visited his family home, a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property and a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings comprise the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Click on the image to buy the ebook from Amazon. Paperback version now available.

If you really want to know what a president and first lady were like, find out what they ate. The New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President, tells you about the six New England presidents, their servants, their families, their friends and how they struggled to make the White House presentable for public entertainment. Click here to buy the ebook; here for the paperback.

Images: Graves-Gilman House By Eumenes12 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5447836. Walker Point, By Zollernalb – own work, eigene Arbeit, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2730841. Franklin Pierce Homestead By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20697770. Plymouth Notch By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34788716. Peacefield by By Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3162095.

This story about presidential houses was updated in 2023.

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6 Places That Became a Summer White House

The summer White House has featured in presidential life since John Adams returned to Quincy, Mass., to get away from the muggy heat of Washington, D.C.

Spending time away from the nation’s capital also allowed presidents to sense the country’s mood and to thank their wealthy donors. New England’s wealth and cool weather attracted presidential families in the days before air conditioning.

Here are places in each of the six New England states that became a summer White House.

The Thimble Islands, Branford, Conn.

A Thimble island

According to Connecticut legend, President William Taft spent part of a presidential summer on the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are an archipelago of 365 small islands off the coast of Branford in the Long Island Sound.

The Branford Historical Society cautions that Taft probably only visited the Thimbles as a Yale student, though ConneticutHistory claims Taft had a summer home there for two years in the 1900s.

Rutherford B. Hayes did visit Branford as president. His grandfather was born in Branford, and his great-grandfather had built the Totoket Hotel on Main Street. In 1889, President Hayes came to Branford to see the hotel his great-grandfather built. The townspeople presented him with an axe made by his great-grandfather at a reception outside the hotel.

Totoket Hotel, photo courtesy the Branford Historical Society.

The Totoket Hotel has long disappeared, but you can still visit the Thimble Islands.

Bar Harbor, Maine

President Taft’s first summer White House in Beverly.

President William Howard Taft’s summer White House started out in Beverly, Mass. For four summers, his staff ran the government from borrowed offices in downtown Beverly.

Taft’s first hostess in the city got sick and tired of Secret Service interference, nosy tourists and the hubbub surrounding the president. She told Taft not to come back at all. She even threatened to tear down the house, located at Lynch Park. Instead, she cut it in pieces, floated it across the harbor to Marblehead and left Taft to move to a new house in the neighborhood.

Taft then announced with great fanfare in July of 1910 that he would make an extended trip to Maine. With stops planned for Eastport, Bangor, Ellsworth, Rockland and Islesboro, Taft would base his operations in Bar Harbor. There, he would stay on the 273-foot presidential yacht Mayflower, with its crew of 200.

Hancock House

A Summer White House in Maine

Taft first touched land in Eastport, then sailed on to Bar Harbor for a three-day stop.

He spent much of his time with wealthy summer residents. This caused a bit of a stir among the year-rounders, which Taft tamped down by giving a speech on the town bandstand.

“The three days that have passed in Bar Harbor will be red letter days in my life,” he told the crowd. “The air is like champagne in a Prohibition state, and without the uncomfortable consequences that follow imbibing that liquor.”

However, Taft’s visit to Mount Desert Island was not without trouble. He shot a 23 on a single hole during one round of golf when he got stuck in a sand trap. On the same course, the 300-pound-plus president tripped and sprained an ankle.

Taft at his summer White House

And, when he spoke to a crowd at the Hancock House in Ellsworth, pickpockets made off with hundreds of dollars from unsuspecting Mainers who came to hear him speak.

Most of the spots Taft visited are either gone or in private hands, but a few survive. The Bangor House Hotel is still at the corner of Main and Union streets, though it’s now housing. Taft participated in services at the stately Ellsworth Congregational Church. He took tea at the Jordan Pond House and the Kebo Country Club — the scene of Taft’s rough game — remains open to this day.

Hyannis Port, Mass.

The Kennedy Big House

The summer cottage that Joseph P. Kennedy rented in Hyannis Port in 1926 would eventually become the summer White House. Hyannis then (and now) belonged to the Irish Riviera.

The waterfront house had commanding views of Nantucket Harbor. Kennedy bought it in 1928 and set about enlarging and improving it for his growing family. It had six bedrooms and four servants’ rooms on the second floor, a wine cellar in the shape of a ship’s hull and a motion picture theater in the basement.

In 1956, Joseph Kennedy’s son John bought a smaller home of his own near the big house. In 1959, the youngest child, Edward, bought a house next to the other two in 1959. He sold it to his brother Robert and his wife, Ethel, in 1961, and later bought another home nearby.

John F. Kennedy used the compound as his headquarters for his 1960 campaign for president. He then used it as the summer White House during his presidency.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

The main house was recently donated to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The compound can’t be visited, but it can be seen from the tour boats that leave from Hyannis.

To see rare photos of the Kennedy family at the Hyannis Port compound, click here.

Cornish, N.H.

Harlakenden House

Woodrow Wilson spent several weeks in the summers of 1913 through 1915 at Harlakenden, a country estate in Cornish, N.H. Wilson leased his summer White House from Winston Churchill – the American Winston Churchill, a writer who lost a race for governor of New Hampshire in 1906.

Harlakenden sat on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. Cornish was the center of an art colony of about 100 artists, writers and politicians from about 1895 to the end of World War I. It stretched from Windsor, Vt., to Plainfield, N.H. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the central figure in the colony, which included Ethel Barrymore, Frederic Remington, Daniel Chester French, Isadora Duncan, Maxwell Perkins and Maxfield Parrish.

On Sept. 12, 1913, a play called Sanctuary: A Bird Masque was performed in Cornish with Wilson, his wife and the British ambassador in the audience. Miss Eleanor Wilson played the lead role and Miss Margaret Wilson sang the opening song, The Hermit Thrush. The play’s theme was the senseless slaughter of birds for frivolous purposes.

The occasion was the dedication of the Meriden, N.H., bird sanctuary – one of the first in the nation.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress . Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for decorative purposes. The play helped keep the heat on. Wilson returned from his summer White House early because the tariff bill had passed, with the language about birds intact.

Harlakenden burned to the ground, but the Cornish art colony survives as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Newport, R.I.

Eisenhower House

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, decamped to the Naval Base in Newport, R.I. There he dealt with the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Ark.

He also summered in Newport during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 Eisenhower stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. So he moved to a mansion at Fort Adams for two summers in Newport.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

It now belongs to Fort Adams State Park, and you can rent it for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Plymouth Notch

Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Though Coolidge spent most of his adult life in Northampton, Mass., he often visited his family home. It is a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property. In the summer of 1924, a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings are the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Brigadoon as a Summer White House

The Coolidge homestead is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.”

Coolidge and his sons in Plymouth Notch, 1916

Coolidge expressed his feelings about his home state in an eloquent speech that followed the disastrous flood of 1927.

“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.^”

Photo of the Thimble Islands by JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49575458.

This story about the summer White House in each state was updated in 2022.

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JFK Born In Brookline, May 29, 1917

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy came into the world, his family was not yet wealthy and glamorous, and it hadn’t yet been plagued by tragedy. All that would befall the Kennedys by the time the world knew the boy by his initials, JFK.

Rose Kennedy and her children, circa 1922. L-R: Rose Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy (seated in foreground), John F. Kennedy, and Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Bachrach Studios photograph in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

His mother was the daughter of a former Boston mayor and future congressman.

And his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose wife’s uncle Teddy Roosevelt had served as president of the United States eight years earlier.

When Fortune magazine in 1957 published its first list of the richest people in the United States, Joseph P. Kennedy was in the top 20. He had held high government posts by then, and John F. Kennedy would be well on his way to becoming the 35th president of the United States.

JFK

John F. Kennedy was born in a bed by a window in a three-story frame house at 83 Beals St. in Brookline, Mass., on the afternoon of May 29, 1917.

JFK birthplace

His mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, said the bed was next to the window so the doctor could have good light.

His father bought the house in 1914 before he married Rose. He was an up-and-coming businessman who chose the house because it had plenty of space for kids to play in. The house was close to good schools, shops at Coolidge Corner and a trolley. Joe Kennedy didn’t own a car when he bought the house.

By the time Jack was born, his 28-year-old father owned a Model T and drove it to his job as assistant general manager of the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass. It was at the shipyard that he met Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy. Roosevelt later appointed Joe Kennedy as chair of the SEC and as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Rose Kennedy

Rose Kennedy was a 26-year-old housewife, the daughter of former Boston Mayor John Francis ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald. In 1917, Honey Fitz had been out of the mayor’s office for three years, but he would serve briefly in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1919. Later he ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate and for governor of Massachusetts.

Rose Kennedy recorded details about her children — their births, illnesses and shoe sizes — on notecards she kept in a wooden box. When her second son was born, she wrote,

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Born Brookline, Mass. (83 Beals Street) May 29, 1917

Soon nicknamed Jack, he shared a room with his older brother Joseph, Jr., during the years the family lived in the 83 Beals St. house. He was often ill, hospitalized with scarlet fever – then a life-threatening illness – when he was three.

John F. Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy, 1919. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

Before he was 11 years old he suffered from scarlet fever, chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, German measles and chronic bronchitis. His family joked a mosquito took a risk by biting Jack — with his blood, the mosquito was sure to die.

Upward Mobility

Joe Kenned, stung by anti-Irish prejudice, had vowed he’d make a million dollars by the time he was 35. He did.

When Jack Kennedy was three, the Kennedys moved to a larger house in Brookline a few blocks away to accommodate the growing family. Eventually the family would have nine children, five girls and four boys.

The Kennedy family spent summers at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. The children were encouraged to compete with each other swimming, sailing and playing touch football. Years later, Jack brought his girlfriend, Jacqueline Bouvier, to Hyannis Port to meet the family. She was horrified. So were his sisters who, unlike Jackie, raced around the compound in old tennis clothes and sneakers.

Jackie compared her reception to a sorority hazing, called the sisters ‘the rah-rah girls’ and told her own sister ‘they fall over each other like a pack of gorillas.’

The Kennedy Children, 1928 (L-R) Jean, Bobby, Patricia, Eunice, Kathleen, Rosemary, Jack, Joe Jr. Hyannisport, 1928. Photograph in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

President Kennedy

John F. Kennedy grew up to become president of the United States, but not before his family suffered one tragedy after another.

A botched lobotomy left his older sister Rosemary with the mental capacity of a toddler. His older brother Joe was killed in World War II. Sister Kathleen died in a plane crash.

A Kennedy press conference. Photo courtesy JFK Library, taken by Abbie Rowe.

An assassin killed John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and another murdered his younger brother Robert less than five years later.

The Kennedy family repurchased the John F. Kennedy birthplace in 1966 and donated it to the National Park Service.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Theodore White Creates the Camelot Myth About John F. Kennedy

One week after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Theodore White wrote a Life magazine article comparing his administration to Camelot. White thought he was doing a favor for a grieving widow.

Jackie Kennedy thought she was taking control of history.

And she was right.

The Kennedy inauguration

Camelot

Theodore White got close to John F. Kennedy in 1960 when he wrote his best-seller, The Making of the President, 1960.

The book changed the way journalists reported on political campaigns. White’s vivid storytelling presented the campaign as a drama involving a large cast of characters including campaign staff and family.

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy; Prime Minister Nehru; the Prime Minister’s daughter Indira Gandhi; President Kennedy.

After her husband’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy knew the ideal venue for perpetrating the myth of Camelot: a Life magazine article written by White.

Life’s charming photo spreads promoted the Kennedy family’s mystique throughout John F. Kennedy’s years in the Senate and the White House.

White, also a Bostonian, knew the Kennedys well before John F. Kennedy ran for president of the United States.

Born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston on May 5, 1915, he went to Harvard with Kennedy’s brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr .

Bobby Kennedy, Eunice Shriver, Caroline Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, John Kennedy, after viewing John F. Kennedy lying in state.

On Nov. 28, 1963, a week after the assassination, the grieving 34-year-old widow summoned White to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. She then gave him a four-hour interview.

She insisted on portraying her late husband as a “man of magic.” She wanted White to help “rescue” her husband’s legacy by linking his presidency to King Arthur and the Roundtable. And she admitted her obsession with portraying her late husband as a hero.

At the time, a play called Camelot appeared on Broadway. Jackie focused on the ending lyrics of an Alan Jay Lerner song from the play. She told White, “The lines he loved to hear were: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’.”

Overwrought

White dictated a thousand-word story later that night to his editors at Life magazine from the servants’ quarters at the Kennedy compound. The editors then objected to some of the Camelot lines as overwrought.

But Jackie objected to the changes, and the Life editors complied with her wishes.

White then donated his papers in 1969 to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. He stipulated that they remain sealed until one year after Jackie Kennedy’s death.

White died on May 15, 1986.

Then Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she died on May 19, 1994. White’s manuscript with her handwritten changes then went public in 1995.

After the Camelot quote, she penciled in a line – twice — “and it will never be that way again!”

Read his Life magazine essay here.

This story updated in 2022.

Image: The Kennedys and Nehrus by Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Public Domain.

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Peleg Nye, The Jonah of Cape Cod

Peleg Nye in 1864 had the bad luck to encounter a whale that decided to have him as a snack. As the first mate of the whaling schooner George W. Lewis, he commanded one of the whaleboats that pursued a mammoth sperm whale off the Cape de Verde islands. The encounter came close to killing him.

Peleg Nye

Much like fracking today, the whale industry in the 1800s drew countless men to the business because of the wealth that could be acquired selling whale oil. The price at one time exceeded $1.75 per gallon, and the rarer varieties used in perfumes commanded even greater prices.

Men overlooked the obvious dangers of the trade to chase their fortunes, and many died in the process.

Nye’s run-in occurred in March of 1863. While much of the nation focused on the ongoing battles of the Civil War, Nye served as first mate aboard the George W. Lewis. The Lewis by then had acquired little whale oil after a nine-month voyage.

Nye had risen to first mate after a setback to his career. Born in Sandwich, Mass., he went to sea at 17. By his 34th year, he captained the whaling schooner Belle Isle. But on April 11, 1851, the schooner collided with a steamship six miles off Cape Ann. The tragedy cost four lives and Nye’s career.

Or so it seemed. By 1863, Peleg Nye was first mate of the George W. Lewis under the command of Hiram Holmes. Holmes, fortunately for posterity, recorded what happened that day in his logbook.

On Nov. 16, 1864, the Lewis got underway at 8 a.m. off the Isle of Sal. At 2 p.m., a lookout spotted a large sperm whale. “John Dyer raised a large lone sperm whale bound towards Bonivista,” wrote Holmes. The crew, no doubt, felt excitement at the prospect of a chase and a large yield of oil.

The Chase

The seamen lowered two whaleboats into the water, Holmes in charge of one and Nye the other. The whale surfaced near Nye’s boat. Wrote Holmes, “The whale immediately began sounding, and ran out about 100 fathoms of line from the three hundred they had in the two tubs. Then Nye went forward and they began to take in the slack…Mr. Nye shot him.”

Nye would have used a whaling gun, which shot a lance that carried a bomb. When the lance hit the whale, the bomb would have exploded.

Nye shot him again, which seemed to have finished him off. The whale rose and lay on his side. Peleg Nye decided to finish him off. He ordered the men to row close to the whale, and then he shoved a hand lance into him. The whale thrashed and hit the whaleboat with his lower jaw. That knocked Nye overboard, into the whale’s open jaws.

The whale clamped his jaws shut onto Peleg Nye’s legs just below the knees and carried him well below the surface. Fortunately for Nye, his legs fit between the spaces that separated the whale’s teeth.

Nye recalled holding his breath and pressing against the whale’s mouth. He finally took a breath and water filled his lungs. Then he passed out.

Recovery

“He was down under water so long that when he came up he was most gone,” wrote Holmes in his logbook. “[H]e never spoke for half an hour, one of the bones was fractured to his leg both badly bruised he was nearly full of water took him on board[. I] doctored him as well as I could.”

Holmes managed to revive Nye while ordering the crew to bring the whale alongside the Lewis by dark. Nye later said that whatever Holmes did to bring him back to life, he wished he hadn’t because he suffered so much. He did, however, get better slowly.

Nye returned to whaling after his adventure as a captain of the Montezuma. He and his wife built a house in Hyannis Port, and by 62 he had retired. Nye died at the age of 79. His obituary noted “he was much esteemed as a citizen for his quiet and kind disposition.”

Edmund Gardner

The story of Edmund Gardner is similar. A Quaker, he lived in Nantucket in the days before vacationing Wall Street financiers overran the island. In 1816, he toppled in to the ocean and a whale grabbed hold of him.

Gardner was rescued, but the incident left him the worse for wear . He went through the rest of his life with a stump for a left hand that appeared crippled, but retained some uses.

Captain Edmund Gardner of Nantucket and New Bedford, His Journal and His Family, described his hand. “[T]he stump, or what was visible below the coat-sleeve, look(ed) like a twisted rope’s end, but still retaining clutch enough to carry the chowder-spoon to his mouth…Four of the whale’s teeth were driven into him! one entering his skull, a second breaking his collar bone, a third breaking his arm, and the fourth crushing his hand — the remainder of his body being simply squeezed into a jelly. The healing of the wound in the head left a cavity like the inside of an egg-shell.”

A Third Victim

On June 11, 2021, a 56-year-old lobster diver named Michael Packard said he dove about 45 feet down the waters off Provincetown. All of a sudden, he felt a bump and “everything went dark,” he told WBZ-TV. He thought a shark had attacked him, but realized he didn’t feel any teeth. He also didn’t feel any pain.

Packard realized, “oh my God, I’m in a whale’s mouth … and he’s trying to swallow me,” he told the television station after leaving Cape Cod Hospital. He thought he would die. But after 30 seconds, the whale spat him out, and his crewmate hauled him into the surface boat.

His legs, like Peleg Nye’s, were just badly bruised.

With thanks to Peleg Nye, The Jonah of Cape Cod by Nils Bockman. This story was updated in 2022.

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